Well, what can you say?

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Whack 'em and stack 'em.

 When it comes to being a merchant of death, my brother Shag is more like a street peddler of flesh wounds. Not saying that I'm any better at killing things mind you, but I had to have something to say about my brother.

He has recently taken up bowhunting, a sport I've been involved in for years off and on. We both have bow kills to our credit. Shag has a nice fallow deer on his wall he bow killed. I don't have anything on the wall with a bow, but I have put meat in the freezer.

I remember my first bow kill. It was a rattlesnake. I emptied the .45 I carried, missing the snake every time. Disgusted, I took a broadhead off an arrow, and pinned the snake to the ground with the blunted arrow. This year in deer bow season, I got a small doe.

Blue tailed skink.

Some years back Shag and I were slinging arrows in our Grandmother's back yard. As happens, we sometimes missed the target. Shag collected arrows.

In one collection, he held up a blue tailed skink. Dead. The lizard was in the weeds behind the target. Shag's broadhead (I wasn't shooting broadheads) cut the skink's neck perfectly. Killed it right there. That was his first bow and arrow kill. No, we didn't eat it.

This weekend, a crew from Team No Prisoners show came over to film some stuff, hunt, reload and in general behave like hunters.

So. Saturday afternoon, I put folks in stands. Went to my stand. 30 minutes after settling in, I hear a shot. I text Shag."You shoot?" He replies yes, a bobcat. He heads out to retrieve said critter.

We shoot bobcats, yotes and foxes. They eat are rabbits and wild turkeys. We don't tolerate 4-legged competition.

A few minutes later another text message.

Shag shot the tail off the bobcat.

I am not kidding. He has the tail and should, by now, have it attached somewhere to his already mounted bobcat.

That evening while looking for coons, all we find are armadillos. PeeWee, with his .270 (which is now an inside joke) shoots one and misses another. He is a bit depressed now. This is the first miss with that rifle.  We retire for the evening, me extremely glad to have one dead dammit, but annoyed that 3 more got away. Yes, I have an irrational hatred of armadillos, which as Shag points out I have now rationalized.

A good dammit.

Sunday morning in a stand with PeeWee and the camera, a doe walks about. Shag shoots. I get a text "DOE DOWN!" Then, they can't find it. I go help. We review the footage. A clean miss.


I will not tell you how many deer Shag has missed this year, but it is one less than all the deer I have missed in my entire deer hunting career. That said, I have missed way more critters than Shag but I have also hunted a lot more than my brother.

Misses come with the territory. Unfortunately, so does the occasional wounded animal such as the 6 point I shot and lost in black powder season this year. Real hunters accept the misses and massively regret the woundings and lost animals. An animal wounded by a hunter is no different from an animal wounded by someone in a vehicle. The difference is, hunters accept it as part of the process. Hunters, in case you wonder, come in two and four-legged and two-legged and two wings varieties,

What can you say, except, Team No Prisoners, y'all come back. Somewhere there's a really bob-tailed bobcat that I want on someone's wall so it won't eat any more of my wild turkeys.